/ 18 February 2005

Afghanistan’s children freeze to death

Aid workers in Afghanistan said on Friday they feared up to 1 000 children may have died from cold and malnutrition during severe winter weather affecting the west of the war-shattered country.

”Several hundred to a thousand would be a low estimate of the number of children that could have died,” said Paul Hicks, programme director western region Afghanistan for Catholic Relief Services.

Western Ghor province has been hit hard by snowstorms in Afghanistan’s worst winter for more than a decade and most of the province remains out of reach of humanitarian aid and blanketed by snow.

Afghan and United Nations officials said on Thursday that the cold snap had claimed at least 267 lives in Afghanistan in the past month, many of them children. Thousands more people are thought to be stranded in remote areas.

Hicks said a 10-person team from his organisation had hiked to 16 villages which had been snowed in and had found five children had died in each hamlet in Ghor’s Sharack district.

”Eighty children died last month — most in the last 10 days or two weeks and what is getting them is the cold and lack of food, because they are already undernourished due to the drought,” Hicks said.

Afghanistan has suffered from a lengthy drought in recent years which has caused misery for poverty-stricken farmers and people throughout rural areas.

Hicks said his team had reached only a fraction of the 250 villages in Sharack district alone and had not been able to get through to any villages in neighbouring Tulak and Saghar district.

Deputy Provincial Governor Ikramuddin Rezaie said that tens of thousands of people were facing a food shortage in remote villages.

”It is a serious challenge — if not taken care of it will cause a human catastrophe,” he said.

Rezaie joined aid workers in calling for help in getting relief to some of the worst hit areas and said local authorities were struggling to clear roads and get relief to the isolated villages.

Geno Teofilo, communications manager for World Vision, which has seven clinics in the province, said 28 000 people were at risk in Ghor from the cold, disease and related health problems.

Because the roads have been blocked and daily efforts to clear routes are wiped away by heavy nightly snowfalls, food and other humanitarian aid is stranded with UN agencies in western Afghanistan’s largest city of Herat.

”The most urgent need now is to get helicopters up to the most remote areas to determine how serious the situation is and provide relief where it’s needed,” Hicks said.

”Most of Ghor is isolated right now. We are not even talking about communities which are remote and far-flung but the district centres, which are normally accessible, are isolated right now,” he said.

Deputy governor Rezaie said a team of doctors who were sent from Kabul by the Ministry of Health has not yet been able to get to the remote villages as most of the roads remained blocked.

”If they don’t send the supplies by air it wouldn’t be possible to make it by road,” he said. – Sapa-AFP